A New Year, A Fresh New Look

Hello 2015! You have swept in and are flying by already. In preparation for you we swept out the cobwebs and have launched excitedly into this year with a fresh new look and a fabulous new office… well, it will be a fabulous new office, when Telkom finally pitches up to change the phone points!

Our Show Works family grew last year when Niall Griffin, designer extraordinaire, officially joined the ranks in October, heading up Show Works’ very own design department. Having him on board means that we are able to better meet our clients’ needs, by now offering a full range of in-house design services, including costume, set, graphic and event styling. It also means that life is much prettier now! When he walked into our offices last year and beheld the explosion of colour, costumes, clutter and coffee cups, he shook his head and took out his tape measure. Then secretly, in the middle of the night (well, actually in the first week of January, while the rest of us where nursing Christmas food-babies), he gutted the furniture, built new desks, repainted the walls and laid laminate floors. When you walk in now, you cannot help but be calm! In fact when you look at this picture, doesn’t a sense of I want to go to there wash over you?

Swanky new offices aren’t the only make-over that Show Works has recently undergone. In May last year we decided that it was time to give our website a face-lift. We called best-in-the-business, Neil Pursey from Webgrowth, and tasked him with reworking our site so that it more accurately reflected the corporate nature our business has taken, while still retaining the fun and creative essence of US. We are very happy with the outcome! We feel that the website is now slick, user friendly and intuitive, highlighting the work we are most proud of and providing visitors with a comprehensive portfolio of our offerings. But, getting to this point was not the simple, ‘make it rad’ task we expected. In fact we were no where near prepared for the elephant we’d set ourselves to eat. First task was to decide and strategize how we wanted the website to work, what we loved about other websites, what we hated, what we wanted for ours. Here Neil was an invaluable help, guiding us through the process with ease, showing us the latest trends and innovations in web design and helping us decide what suited our business best. Next we needed to sift through a 9 year long list of over 300 events, selecting only 25 which showed the broadest and clearest range of what we do and can offer. Then find hi-res photos, source client testimonials, write blurbs and triple edit ourselves. All this needed to be done using just the right, fun-but-professional tone, highlighting our strengths and letting only the tiniest sliver of our crazy shine through. We managed to get this right by allowing an “about” page that revealed exactly how silly we all are. Needless to say, it is by far our favourite page! Finally, we took ourselves off for a photo shoot, hair and make-up done by Niall, and spent the morning pouting, posing and photo-bombing each other. Once all these elements came together, we had our brand new, fresh looking and fabulous, Show Works Website. It was an elephant that took 8 months to eat, but what a delicious meal by the time the plates were clean. Have a snoop around and let us know what you think…